Posts categorized "Weblogs"

March 11, 2010

On March 9, 2000 I registered the domain http://newsgrist.com and started sending out email newsletters to subscribers -- these were plain text messages that aggregated links and excerpts from interesting articles and projects around the then much smaller Internets. In 2004, NEWSgrist moved into the burgeoning realm of blogs as a 'reBlog'. At the moment, my postings are slower than usual due to some interesting work and travel. In any case, I will be in NY briefly this weekend, and I aim to celebrate 10 years of NEWSgrist. Please join me this Saturday from 8pm on at Tom & Jerry's bar on Elizabeth Street, just above Houston.

January 14, 2010

I just launched Cook-Stir.com, a twitter-generated interface for between-tweets cookery. Upload pics of cooking - especially if you're an artist who cooks while procrastinating in the studio - or post blurry shots of your latest debauched meal out to your twitter stream. use the hashtag #cookstir. The challenge: How to tweet a recipe in 140 characters?

September 12, 2009

Check out Lit Drift, the new blog, resource, and community dedicated to the art & craft of fiction in the 21st century. Featuring daily creative prompts, short stories, and a weekly FREE book giveaway called Free Book Friday. Here's one post that caught my eye:

With 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even Star Trek,
the notion of transformative work has been a particularly hot topic
these past few months. Transformative work not only plays havoc with
intellectual property law, but also with the audience as storytellers
take our familiar, beloved characters and then subvert them entirely.
Holden Caulfield is 76 years old and on the run from a nursing home,
Elizabeth Bennett defends her family from hoards of zombies, and James
Tiberius Kirk finds himself without a father and a long way to go
before he can become captain of the USS Enterprise. The result is all
the more shocking and enlightening given the juxtaposition of the
transformed work with our knowledge of the original work.

It’s a compelling artistic endeavor. And transformative work is nothing new. Fans of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad wrote their own books based on his works. Cervantes’ Don Quixote saw more than a few unauthorized published sequels. John Gardner’s Grendel,
a re-telling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, was published
to great acclaim (which, being one of my favorite books, I definitely
recommend you giving it a read). Gregory Maguire’s best-selling Wicked, an alternate take on The Wizard of Oz, is now one of Broadway’s biggest hits. You get the idea.

But what about fan-made transformative works? While there are
countless pieces of fan fiction and fan art out there, in which fans
take their favorite characters and merely continue their stories,
genuine transformative works are far less common. But as few and
far-between as they may be, their stories really resonate.

After the jump, a short list of lesser-known, but by no means
lesser-quality, fan-made transformative storytelling that challenge the
old adage “there are no new stories.”

July 14, 2009

Historically
speaking, those of us who embraced the Web long ago have suffered the
summary dismissal that tends to accompany all major cultural paradigm
shifts. This all-too-familiar feeling of resistance toward the Web
(hide your daughters, the Internet is coming!) has only been
exacerbated by the current economic climate, where newsroom vets are
gripped by terror as “The Youngs” hack their way into a system formerly
reserved for J-school initiates. As the mainstream media embrace the
Web, that dialectic tension already feels a bit tedious. Bloggers are
getting their due—or making progress at, least—and that is that. We are
and always have been evangelists for the Web, devoted to a platform
that provides us with a degree of agency that the print bureaucracy
simply does not. The curious part, however, is that we’ve never stopped
wanting to see our words in print, even when editors have refused to
look at them.

Enter the Book Deal, a harbinger of fame (and hopefully, fortune)
that for many now serves as a strategic reason to begin blogging in the
first place. The most lucrative deals tend to be awarded to those whose
sites function as durational book proposals, where an author’s thesis
coalesces through a succession of topical, short-form posts. These
one-offs lend themselves naturally to publication in print, where the
narrative has more room to develop. (A great irony, yes, given the
Web’s indexical capacity. Yet a couple hundred thousand words simply do
not read the same online as they do on the page.) Political pundits
tend to score publishing contracts, as do other subject-specific
authors. Being “Internet famous” never hurts, either: Minds reeled
around this time last year when former Gawker editor Emily Gould spun
her now-seminal New York Times Magazine account of her tendency to
“overshare” into a full-on memoir deal. Her take was initially said to
be $1 million, a rumor that has since been debunked.

Newer
publishing platforms and social networking applications—namely, Tumblr
and Twitter—have ushered in a new kind of blog-to-book deal: The user
generated model. Look at this Fucking Hipster is the Internet
brainchild of one Joe Mande, a standup comedian with his own show at
the Upright Citizens Brigade theater and, as of early June, a
soon-to-be published author. LATFH is his
chronicle of hipsterdom at its sartorial best, posted anonymously to a
Tumblr account that caught the attention of editors at Penguin’s Gotham
Books imprint, publisher of blog-to-book luminaries Barack Obama is
Your New Bicycle and I Can Haz Cheeseburger—not to mention the rest of
the Internet, where Gawker gleefully outed Mande as the site’s author. LATFH
The Book will likely take the form of its analog predecessor, Vice
Magazine’s “Dos and Don’ts”, a dorm room cooler-cum-coffee table-worthy
collection of the magazine’s brutal fashion critiques based on
photographs of dubious origin. Reader-submitted or “found” content is
perfectly suited to Tumblr, a one-click publishing platform whose users
tend to favor rapid-fire, image-heavy posts over longer missives. As
with Twitter, bloggers can “follow” one another’s Tumblr accounts,
re-publishing posts at will in a free-and-easy exchange of authorship,
a Deconstructivist’s dream made manifest through the Web.

While
media watchdogs fixate on the actual book deals—namely, on the dollar
sum of the advance, as this is one form of online commerce that still
amazes us—few pause to consider the books themselves. How strangely
anachronistic is it (and yet, extraordinarily telling) that those who
participate in perhaps the most monumental democratic exercise ever—and
who do so daily, often for a living—would seek to tame the great,
unbridled, immaterial beast that is the Internet with some high-gloss
stock and two binding boards? How thoroughly odd it is that one would
attempt to translate the particular digital reading experience of the
Tumblr blog, or Twitter feed, or Facebook update into an analog one.
What about the Kindle?

When asked why he felt compelled to
select 600 tweets for Twitter Wit, his forthcoming book from Harper
Collins, former Valleywag editor and Internet wunderkind Nick Douglas
cited Postcards from Yo Momma, another blog-to-book phenomenon written
by Jessica Grose and Gawker alum Doree Shafrir:

To make a book out of these submissions is to fix what PFYM is about, or to create an entity intentionally different than PFYM
in certain ways. This is not the mere regurgitation of web content: The
different balance of reader attention, standards of quality, intended
audience, and writer-reader relationship (the reader, for example, can
no longer comment, and a mediocre submission no longer encourages
similar but better submissions) turns the book into something new. Of
course many bloggers with book deals start saving “the good stuff” for
the printed version.

The possible pitfall with
the blog-to-book translation has as much to do with form as it does
content: Sneaking a tweet during a lecture or a film, followed by a
quick checkup on my friends’ updates with a flick of my iPhone’s
screen, is a much different tactical and cognitive experience than
settling in with a piece of printed matter (a veritable luxury given
the good, solid twelve-to-fourteen hours a day I spend online as a
writer and editor). While I appreciate the convenience of a published
compendium of essays culled from a favorite website—again, I’m talking
about long-form writing here—the Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook
experience depends as much on looking as it does on reading. Why else
would Facebook users revolt when the site launched its new interface
several months back? Would the Twitter’s infamous Fail Whale, the
jovial cartoon that delivers a pop-up apology when the system is over
capacity, hold its charm in print? Here, I am doubtful. (To be fair
though, perhaps we will surprise ourselves in casting a backwards
glance from the Internet to print. One can hope.)

By that
token, this hybrid identity between blogger and author wouldn’t exist
to begin with if a few chaps in Cambridge and San Francisco hadn’t
taken a gamble on the Internet’s ability to summon our most deeply
rooted needs and desires. Most powerful amongst these is validation:
Everyone wants to feel wanted. And it’s hard to deny an opportunity to
see our names memorialized in a tangible, keepsake form. We can’t
literally hand the Internet down to our children, after all.

Or,
as writer and Gawker contributor, Melissa Gira Grant, who is also
working on a book proposal about sex and the Internet, puts it: “People
will sign over their proprietary rights to a post or an image because
they don’t see a picture of a hamburger as having cultural value unless
it’s published in a book alongside 300 other hamburgers. They can’t see
the aggregate form.” Ultimately, the blog-to-book deal constitutes a
leap of faith on the part of the author (and publisher!)—an attempt to
traverse genres while certain of others’ willingness to come along for
the ride. “Publishing is still a healthy industry,” Douglas insists,
“and this will be the biggest audience some of my contributors have
ever reached.” Spoken like a true believer.

Sarah Hromack is Web Editor of Art in America and the former editor of Curbed San Francisco.

Background: Stephanie Clifford warns that Wired may be about to die. Ad sales are down 50%, putting it just above Power and Motoryacht at the bottom of Condé Nast's portfolio of magazines.

I've got some relatively ancient history to share, but I think it's germane.

After I left Gawker Media, I was contracted by Condé to help the
newly reacquired Wired.com develop a blogging strategy. I spent a few
weeks with the Wired.com chiefs developing a battle plan and presented
it to the magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. He gave it the
nod—he got what I was trying to do instantly—and away we went.

Three months later the traffic to the Wired.com blogs had doubled. I
cleared out writers that weren't working. That didn't always mean they
were bad writers, but usually just bad bloggers—there is a difference.
Even the best magazine writer may not be able to write and report in
front of an audience.

Our most successful blog was Table of Malcontents, run by
our friend John Brownlee (with Lisa, too!), who ran with the
opportunity, creating a "net culture" blog that was the archetypal
model for what we were trying to create: Smart, fast, full of
personality, two steps ahead of mainstream tastes. It had a superstar
team, and with hard work they were soon the most popular blog on the
network behind Rob's Gadget Lab. (They also did much to make my not-so-secret motto come true: "Make Wired weird again.")

Then the magazine folks stepped in. As soon as it became clear that
Wired.com's blogs might actually get some traction, the magazine
started to dabble. I had structured the blogs so that each had a lead
editor, something that that worked very well at Gawker. No one had a
problem with that—until it meant that my lead bloggers might be telling
magazine staffers what to do.

It's not unusual for print journalists to look down at online
writers, and often rightly so. There are some amazing reporters and
writers whose work appears in Wired, people who do the sort of storytelling that bloggers rarely have the time or skill to do.

But reporters treating their online peers like that at Wired?
It was accepted without much question that the magazine side of the
business—literally across the "Berlin Hall"—always trumped the online
side.

I made it about six months before I felt too constrained by both the
magazine and its publishers and moved on. Since then, Wired.com's grown
to 11 million monthly visitors: its blogs are among the best in their
fields and its tech news reportage is among the finest, online or
off—successes I don't take credit for. The sheer size of that
readership speaks volumes: the Times says the magazine has
only 700k or so subscribers. (It's a damn shame that online advertising
is devalued compared to print advertising, but that's the media world
for you.)

Wired makes a fantastic magazine. The "puzzle" edition last
month was just brilliant, and I skimmed it from cover to cover. But for
technology and pop science reporting, the market has moved on. Tech
magazines, now matter how well executed, are nothing more than a cute
anachronism, with the same sort of boutique market as hand-made
stationery.

Which isn't to say that we or anyone else who writes for money isn't
doomed; we just don't have to buy paper by the ton roll, nor keep a
support staff around nearly as large as our editorial staff.

Wired is great print, but if the magazine can't make money
and is shuttered, taking the website down with it, I'm going to be
livid. Not that making money online is easy—it's not, especially
without sacrificing your ethics and your voice—but if any mainstream
outlet should be able to make the transition, it should be Wired.

I fear that may be impossible, not just for Wired but for
all these old brands, because they can't accept that the work at which
they have excelled for years will be just as important when it's
online—and online only.

P.S. No one actually ever called it the "Berlin Hall" except me.
P.P.S. The fact that it was the Times that published this piece, one of my other dear media orgs also choking and sputtering on the future, was not lost on me.